


live through this and you won't look back

by noiselesspatientspider



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canonical Character Death, M/M, the working title for this was i Too Live for Pain so like.... enjoy, vague spoilers for Winter in Hieron: Slow Justice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-26
Updated: 2017-06-26
Packaged: 2018-11-19 06:16:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11307414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noiselesspatientspider/pseuds/noiselesspatientspider
Summary: Samothes finishes the blade the day before High Sunday, early in the morning before going to the battlefield. Samot is just visible in the distance, hair ablaze in the sunlight. It is easy to cut through the heat and noise and sweat of their colliding soldiers. It is easy to climb the hill, to stand in front of Samot again. It is the easiest thing in the world.





	live through this and you won't look back

Samothes finishes the sword the day before High Sunday. He would have liked for the final blow to be a massive one, a huge cloud of steam billowing into the air as he tempered the weapon that would in time temper him. He has made so many swords. Instead, the last time he brings hammer to anvil, it is a little tink, hammering out a small flaw in the hilt. 

In Marielda, very, very early that morning, a junior acolyte at the Church of Samothes is hanging a banner when the distant glow of the volcano slowly dwindles, then winks out. He drops the banner and has to spend an hour scrubbing paint from the worn flagstones of the church’s entrance. On his way home to fall into bed before waking a few short hours later to continue preparations, he wonders, idly, if this is a good omen or bad.

Back in his forge, Samothes sheaths the sword. It makes no noise at all, really, this weight he will carry at his hip. It is just the quiet shick of metal against leather. He leaves the door open when he goes. Primo has trouble with it sticking, sometimes. He hasn’t thought to imagine an after. The plans he drew up centuries ago are untouched. He hopes they will hold. But if they don’t, Primo shouldn’t have to struggle with a door.. 

When he reaches the battlefield, still clad in leather apron and his soot-stained shirt, no one comments on his lack of armor. He is the Artificer Divine, after all. Perhaps he has magicked up some new garment. And after all, who would dare to attack a god? Who would dare to kill one?

It’s on a hill where it finally happens. The sun beats down upon them both, the air hot with the acrid smoke of the fires of army and the engines of war. Samothes can smell sweat, and he isn’t sure if it belongs to him or Samot or a thousand thousand men fighting because a thousand years ago, Samothes found a wolf in a forest and did not kill it. The sweat is probably his. He hasn’t changed his shirt, after all.

Samot looks beautiful. Samot looks like he has aged seventy years, like the wolf has eaten him from the inside out. Samot looks like the boy king he fell in love with, like the father of his child, like the man he has never quite been able to hate. His hair flutters in the wind. He has grown it long again, and it flows like a banner from the iron crown he wears at his brow. 

Samothes has a scar on his thumb from one of the spires on that crown. It had slipped on the forge, making a bid for freedom too early. Samot had wound the gash with far more gauze than was necessary, taking his time winding each loop of cloth around Samothes’ divine hand. 

“So you can be hurt,” he’d said. He’d sounded so deeply, deeply sad.

Samothes presents the sword without speaking. There are some rivers of fire words cannot cross, some bridges beyond even the skill of the Artificer Divine. He thinks he might be smiling. It’s all he really knows how to do. 

Samot reaches out a single slender hand. (He’s wearing gloves. Samothes feels a brief pang. He’d hoped to be able to see those hands again.) It trembles in the air briefly, as though he might reach for Samothes instead. He swallows. Far below them, a horn blows, and Samot drops his hand to the blade. 

“Thank you for coming to me instead,” he says. “You were always a better father than I, in the end.”

Samothes cannot say anything in reply. He doesn’t have the time. Samot has plunged the sword into his chest, and he totters, gasping, to his knees in the grassy field. Around them, the walls of his forge are already rising, stone unwinding from the earth. He wasn’t sure if his tomb would present itself so far from Marielda, but it appears Samol’s old bones know him well enough for one last bit of Reconfiguration. 

The last thing he sees is Samot’s crown glinting in the sun as the stones surge upward as if greeting an old friend.

Samot’s face is blank as he steps over Samothes’ body towards the anvil, newly sprouted from the earth. He pulls the sword from Samothes’ chest. It’s such an easy thing, in the end, to kill a god. Far easier than creating a new one, to be sure. 

Samot holds out his hand, and a hammer unfurls from the wall, followed by a rack to support it. Samothes’ tools hang in uncharacteristic neat rows, but Samot needs only the one. He places the sword on the anvil and raises his arm. He swings, and swings, and swings, until the sword lies in shattered pieces on the ground and he is panting with exertion. 

The hilt still lies on the anvil, its pommel stone cracked wide. Samot bends double, resting his hands on his knees, Samothes’ body crumpled on the floor behind him. The mages had spoken of a tomb, a grand chamber where Samothes would lie in state while a pearl formed around his corpse, that small irritating grain of sand, but in the end they had all been wrong. There is nothing new here after all. Just the cold forge of a dead god. 

As he turns to leave, Samot spies a small purple flower sprouting improbably from the anvil beneath the sheared-off hilt. He plucks it, and in an instant, crushes it in his hand, releasing a perfume like lilies. Samot has always hated lilies. He drops it on Samothes’ brow as he heads towards the door, where it slides down to cover one sightless eye. 

The door opens. From the forge, a carpet of spreading green fumbles, blind vines creeping across the floor, reaching for a rhythm to tether to: a steady rising and falling, a whoosh! Clink. Whoosh! Clink.

Whoosh!  
Samothes’ hammer, balanced for a moment on the edge of the anvil, falls to the floor, its impact muffled by a bed of moss. It glows briefly, and then the forge falls into darkness once more.  
Clink.  


Whoosh!  
The door shuts.  
Clink.  


**Author's Note:**

> shout out to all the folks on mastodon who are 100% definitely asleep rn, much as I should be  
> i pounded this out in two hours so if i messed up the lore it's on me for not, yanno, sleeping on this
> 
> title is from stars' "your ex-lover is dead." i am nothing if not predictable. 
> 
> i'm on twitter @shipyrds come say hi


End file.
